


“there is enough room for both of us.”

by clickingkeyboards



Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [57]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Detection, First Meetings, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Trains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22189414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: While the blond boy is certainly worth staring at, Hazel is more fixated on another passenger on the Orient Express: a darker-skinned boy with thatches of dark hair that seems to be able to match Daisy.Canon Era (AU of First Class Murder)Written for the fifty-sixth prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.
Relationships: Alexander Arcady & George Mukherjee, Daisy Wells & Hazel Wong
Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [57]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164
Kudos: 21





	“there is enough room for both of us.”

There was a rather astonishing commotion at the door on the carriage. Out on the platform, a sharp voice was shouting, “Come along! Come along, Alexander! Open the door, my good man! Hurry along, George! Don’t mind that man!”

Outside, we heard a passerby calling out something to a passenger outside the Calais-Simplon-Istanbul Carriage. “Madame!” cried the rolling French voice of the stranger. “Move your servant boy out of the way, I say!”

“How fucking  _ dare _ you?” cried an English voice.

“George!” said an indistinct voice. “Language!”

“Sorry!”

Jocelyn rushed forward to throw open the door, bowing deeply to those outside. “Countess Demidovskoy!” we heard him say. “Master Arcady! Master…”

“Mukherjee,” said a voice, the English inflexions making a name decidedly abnormal sound completely English.

Terribly excited, we craned out hears forward, as onto the train came the first person who had been speaking, followed by two others. The door slammed shut again after cases were piled on, locking out the noises of the platform. The ‘Countess’ was an old lady, the shrivelled and small sort that shrivels up with age, hair shockingly white and her clothes a beautiful grey that had been tailored to fit. Her eyes darted here and there and her came tapped to and fro. She was beautiful, if rather frightening.

As Jocelyn ordered the luggage to be taken away, the lady began to stalk down the corridor, in our direction. Evidently, not the sort of person who waited.

“My lady!” said Jocelyn. “Can I introduce myself—?”

“There is no need to give your name!” snapped the Countess. This was received by the two accompanying her with an accented groan of embarrassment, followed by suppressed laughter.

She sounded as European as somebody could; the sort of dastardly European-ness of the villains in the spy novels Daisy devours.

But where in Europe could this  _ Countess  _ be from? Her accent was awfully odd, the sort of tones that the Deepdean girls took on when they (rather rudely, in my opinion) played at being dastardly Bolshevik revolutionaries. I had never seen a  _ real _ Russian in the flesh, and neither had Daisy and so we shared an open-mouthed look before staring at the woman.

“I assume you will be attending us?” she snapped in her odd voice.

Jocelyn stammered. “Ah, yes, of course, Countess Demidovskoy. Now, we have you in compartment right, and your grandson and his friend next to you, in number nine. We hope you will all be quite comfortable.”

_ Grandson and his friend?  _ I thought. I pulled my eyes away from the eccentricities of the Countess, finally turning to look at those two accompanied her. The first was a boy who looked exactly the same age as Daisy and me. He was fair and thin-faced, with quite a lot of rather nice blond hair and good eyebrows; and he was clearly still growing, for his ankles and wrists stuck out awkwardly from his clothes, and his cheekbones were sharp. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy partly grown up. 

Daisy pinched me rather hard on the arm and looked at me with an expression that was clearly asking what I was thinking.  _ Where is his friend? _

The clipped British voice we had heard before rose from behind the Countess and her grandson, saying in arresting tones, “Why, I shouldn’t think that you interrogate all your passengers so!”

Then light footsteps made their way down the corridor, and a hand that looked astonishingly dark settled on Alexander’s shoulder, and my heart jumped into my throat at that trick of the light that made my chest ache with thought of people who looked as un-English as I do. Then the person finally dipped out of the frame of vision obscured by the Countess, and I saw that the dark skin was  _ not  _ a trick of the light after all.

The boys were clearly best friends if boys even have such things. Their arms were linked together in the way that Daisy and I often have ours, and they were nudging each other to direct the other’s attention to something in the corridor of the train.

Both boys caught  _ my _ eye (not Daisy’s,  _ mine _ ), and I looked away quickly. Boys!

“Oh!” said the Countess sharply. “That is  _ not _ what I asked for. Three  _ single _ compartments. This will be noted. However, I suppose that you had better show them to me. Come along, Alexander, George.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” the blond boy said. Daisy and I shared a look of surprise. The words were certainly English, but the voice was not Russian, like his grandmother, or English like the darker boy. It tried to imitate the clipped way that Daisy speaks, but there was an odd drawl dragging on each word that did not sound like any accent I had ever heard.

“Of course, Countess Demidovskoy,” replied the other boy, his accent void of the Hong Kong notes of my own, leaping in all the places a voice should not, carrying strange letters and drawing out inflexions that English voices would never think to create. As Asia is diverse, and my father’s parties are full of businessmen from every country, I cannot detect the notes of  _ any _ other country in his tones. It is English, more English than even Daisy’s voice. A London accent.

Daisy and I stared at each other. His voice simply did  _ not  _ match his appearance. 

They came past us — the Countess ignoring us, the boys turning to stare at us. The lighter boy’s look made me uncomfortable. It was direct, searchingly curious, as though he were used to looking at whatever he liked. The darker boy (I presumed that he had strong Indian genetics, if not fully Indian) locked eyes with me, and we shared a look of being utterly un-European in such a white-majority continent. He nodded graciously and then moved his gaze to Daisy.

“Well, Alexander?” snapped the Countess, jabbing her grandson in the shoulder rather hard, then pointing hard towards Daisy and I, frozen in the doorway of our compartment. “Don’t be rude, introduce yourself to the young ladies!”

“It’s not an English thing to do, Grandmother,” he hissed, but he and the Indian boy — George, I reminded myself — were shoved forward, and both of them saw Daisy’s face as more than just an English girl.

The second of them taking in her face felt impossibly long. Then the Indian boy pinched his friend’s arm and he jolted to attention.

“I’m Alexander Arcady,” introduced the blond boy, tugging on his too-short cuffs awkwardly, “and this is my best friend, George Mukherjee. Son of Sir Mangaldas Mukherjee, the renowned doctor?”

Daisy nodded knowledgeably, though I had never heard the doctor’s name before that moment. “I am the  _ Honourable _ Daisy Wells—” Daisy paused here to let her status sink in, a mistake on her part: I saw the two boys exchange a look of pity, as Daisy’s name now carries the weight of the Fallingford trial as opposed to her father being in the House of Lords. “—and this is my best friend, Hazel Wong. You may have heard of her father: Vincent Wong, the owner of Wong Banking?”

Just like Daisy and I, Alexander looked utterly blank while George nodded, his eyes rather wide. “Indeed! My father has shares in it. What an awful privilege to meet his daughter.”

I blushed.

Both boys stuck out their hands for handshakes and, rather oddly, I had not shaken hands with someone in a serious setting before that moment. I was so concentrated on doing it right that all I can recall about that moment now is that George Mukherjee had the most firm and jarring handshake that could ever be felt, and that Alexander had the same rough palm that Bertie Wells does, worn from schoolboy play.

George and Daisy dropped hands and stepped back at the same time. Daisy took a hitching breath, and when I glanced at her, I saw that the wrinkle had appeared at the top of her nose.

Alexander and I exchanged a look, both confused about what our best friends were doing. Daisy takes measure of everybody she meets. It takes her only a moment to understand everything about them — the sort of person they are, what they want, how they might be expected to go about that. I am the only person who has ever confused her.

Both Alexander and I are used to our best friends doing it, but less used to the other person doing it in return. But that is what happened.

George was seeing  _ her _ , not the foolish and pretty victim of the Fallingford Daisy that she likes to show to the world. He saw the secret, clever, noticing Daisy. It was astonishing to see, and Alexander was clearly just as astonished.

“Hello, George Mukherjee,” Daisy said in her clipped and searching tones. “I think that I will enjoy getting to know you better.”

“Who are you here with?” I asked to diffuse the odd genius moment that Alexander and I were exempt from.

George set his hand on Alexander’s shoulder. “Alexander’s grandmother, Countess Demidovskoy.”

“I wish that we weren’t,” Alexander replied, though his tones were light. “I had no idea that she could be so embarrassing.”

“I could, Alex. She’s related to you!”

Alexander shot his best friend the most murderous look, while Daisy and I gave in and laughed.

“ALEXANDER!” the Countess shrieked from her rooms. “GEORGE! COME OVER HERE!”

“We will speak to you later?” Alexander asked.

Before Daisy could disagree, I nodded. “We would like that!”

The two boys ran down the hall towards the Countess while Daisy and I shared a gaze while holding in our laughter.

“Come on,” she said, shutting the door and leaning against it before bursting out laughing.

I could not help but join her.

* * *

The following time we spoke to the boys was on Sunday, when we crossed the Italian border. Our only other interaction with them was when the Countess stalked up to the Daunts and demanded back her necklace.

Alexander and George were both trying to get her to come back to the table, hissing, “ _ Grandmother! _ ” and “ _ Countess Demidovskoy! _ ”

Daisy said to me later that she had never seen two boys convulse with cringe so much.

However, when we emerged from our compartments when we crossed the border, it was an odd interaction.

The policemen were shouting here and there in Italian, and George edged along the wall as quietly as he could. Then he whispered in my ear and said, “Watch out, Wong.”

“What?” I asked, and the word barely escaped from my mouth when a gun was stuck into my face and the Italian policeman said, “Papers, show me her papers. She is not from Europe — what is she doing here?”

To my left, George’s situation was slightly more violent. I suppose that it is the only good thing about being female: males that are official are not violent with you. In comparison to me, George was grabbed by the front of his blue silk shirt and literally lifted from the ground so that his feet barely brushed the ground. “What is this boy doing here? Whose servant is he?”

“Would you put me  _ down _ ?!” George yelled, writhing in the grasp of the officer before Alexander seized his arm and pulled him back.

“I have just as much right to be on this train as anybody else!” George said, saying exactly what I was thinking.

Apparently it was good that I did not say that aloud, as the response was for Alexander to be seized (rather kindly, in comparison to George) by the arm and hauled away, while George was slammed against the beautiful marquetry with the barrel of a gun pressed to his forehead.

Daisy, who had previously been whispering about how antsy they were, and theorising about whether they knew about the spy or not, paused to whisper, “What the  _ fuck _ ?” in my ear.

“I  _ know _ ,” I replied in low tones.

However, it was at this point that Il Mysterioso swept from his compartment and started at the sight of the police.

“ _ Il Mysterioso _ !” Alexander cried out in a rather decent Italian accent. 

Every policeman turned to notice the magician, and George’s body almost gave out in relief. With one hand, Alexander reached over and smoothed out the front of George’s shirt, and we all turned to stare at Il Mysterioso’s trick as he pulled fabric from his lips and locked his bedroom door somehow.

The four of us locked eyes and, when the policemen trickled off the train, the boys strolled over to us. “Isn’t he amazing?” Alexander nodded at Il Mysterioso’s closed compartment door.

“If Alex doesn’t end up a Pinkerton, I think he might turn out to be a magician,” George added, curling his hand against Alexander’s shirt. His hand seemed to always be on the other boy’s shoulder.

Daisy blinked. “Pinkerton?” she sacked.

“Oh, right,” said Alexander. “Sorry. They’re this American detective agency. I think they’re incredible. My parents want me to join my father’s company but I’d like to be a detective.”

George followed up this statement, which sounded odd: he did not seem like the sort of person to be a follower. However, I suppose having your head slammed against a wooden carving of a Chinese lotus will do that to you. “We’re already practising.”

I have a feeling that this situation would have happened differently if it were only Alexander we had met, but George was clearly a Daisy sort of genius and I could tell that she desperately wanted to tell him.

“Are you detecting the Daunts or something?” I asked, sounding as naive as possible.

“Too?” Daisy added onto the end, and I turned to look at her with comical shock.

“Naturally,” George said and squared up to Daisy with folded arms.

Daisy stepped up to face him too, so they are almost nose to nose. “Well, there cannot be  _ two _ detective agencies on this train!”

“There is enough room for both of us!” George disagreed.

They stared and stared, Alexander and I exchanging glances until they both took deep breaths and said, “I guess I can allow it.”

They paused and glared at the words they had shared, and then both began to speak again. “On one condition…”

“Go on?” Daisy said, her blue eyes boring into George’s dark ones.

“No, you go first.”

“Three,” Alexander said, clearly bored of the tension and wanting to count them down to voicing their demands, “two, one…”

“ _ You _ help  _ us _ .”

They stared at each other again with murderous glares until I sighed. “You are like mutts marking territory.”

“I am not!” they said in unison, and I muffled laughter.

“Let’s work together,” Alexander suggested, holding up a hand for a handshake.

After a long pause, Daisy said, “Alright. But don’t expect us to detect as you do.”

“Shake on it?”

George and Daisy shook, and so did Alexander and I. Then I turned to Daisy and we did our handshake, and she said, “Detective Society forever.”


End file.
